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Comment by vogre | Hacker News Reader

There always were a lot of propaganda involved since forever. Even now Russia is demonised in Western Media, mostly quite unfair.

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Given that Russia has used a nerve agent near where I live I'll give the media a pass on demonising Russia.

I don't know what happened there but the official version leaves some serious doubts open. For example there was a long time talk of a "nurse" that found them. Only by accident it was revealed that this nurse was the head-nurse of the UK forces, i.e. in the rank of a general, well versed in chemical warfare. Also why was never the full tracks of the two Russians the victims revealed? There is CCTV on every corner in the UK. The story of the Russians was bogus but so is the official story. It wouldn't be the first time the gov stretches the truth. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

Edit: downvoting because it doesn't fit your world view? At least have the balls to reply.

The official story would always be vague. This is spook territory not regular police. A Scotland Yard team went to interview Litvinenko's assassins (One of whom was being treated for radiation poisoning - fancy that!), and they were completely outgunned by the FSB.

Also, as to CCTV, it is extremely prevalent in London but not as omniscient in places like Salisbury.

Security services sit on information like this for years, possibly never to reach daylight i.e. it's at best 50/50 whether MI5's director(Hollis) in the 50s and 60s was a double agent for the GRU, but we will never know what is in the archives. It is undeniable, however, that the Russian's did it - a Russian nerve agent just happens to turn up in the middle of Salisbury!?

> A Scotland Yard team went to interview Litvinenko's assassins (One of whom was being treated for radiation poisoning - fancy that!), and they were completely outgunned by the FSB.

Source?

From a BBC documentary into the investigation at the time. One of the members of the scotland yard team suggested they were poisoned by the russians (Laxatives in the water or similar not Po)

Do you have more information or some good sources on the MI5 director? That seems like a fascinating read.

Read Spycatcher by Peter Wright, incredibly interesting story of a working class MI5 scientific intelligence officer (engineer) turned literal spycatcher - largely spending his time chasing the work of naive upperclass communists of years gone by.

During Hollis's tenure, the KGB and GRU were just one step ahead every single move they made, to the point that they broke up a spy ring and the KGB didn't even phone home to Moscow that day. Other examples include bugged rooms suddenly being vacated or bugs in walls being filled with needle-like precision. They gradually worked up the tree until they realized there had to be a mole very high up in MI5 (or not at all, but it's not as neat).

British intelligence had been completely rocked by the Cambridge Five - communists had infiltrated pretty much everywhere in British intelligence until people like Peter Wright modernized the service largely by running around chasing leads from 40 years ago (in the 1970s) from people like Anthony Blunt who had given up fighting. The British establishment had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the notion that an Englishman could be a communist despite his upbringing and public school training.

Can you imagine the fuss then, when it turns out that Hollis - who is already a very conservative (unambitious, won't step on toes etc.) leader of the service - is suspected of treachery? He had spent years in China in his youth, possibly having contact with known Russian assets. If he was really a spy, the smoking gun is that it turned out that when he was sent to interview Igor Gouzenko (A defector now residing in Canada), he apparently showed almost no interest in what Gouzenko had to say and was wearing a disguise. This may sound relatively innocuous but remember that a defector could quite possibly recognize you on from photographs of their agents.

The main case against this hypothesis relies on a few fairly not overly strong but nonetheless useful points: Oleg Gordievsky (Briefly Deputy Head of the KGB in London) clearly stated that his station chief stated that this rumour around Hollis must've been some British trick. This is potentially very strong evidence, however, it is the word of one man. Gordievsky is reliable, however, but more importantly he was KGB and Hollis was always supposed to be GRU (and he was definitely inactive long before Gordievsky would've been able to speak English let alone stationed in London). ELLI is a currently unknown cryptonym (alleged to be Hollis), it may apparently be Leo Long but that doesn't add up with the leaks from MI5.

MI5 (via Andrew) and MI6 (via Macintyre's book) - both had official archive access, extremely rare for MI6 - both claim its smoke without fire, Misguided conspiracy. It could well be, but this glosses over that there was a (according to Wright at least) an investigation that lasted the best part of a decade neither indicted nor exonerated him (https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104603) but on balance said it was more likely that not that he was not a spy. However, the proceedings of said investigation are not public as far as I can and the investigation-investigation thatcher speaks of in the speech linked to was run by a friend of Hollis. Chapman Pincher seems to allege that Hollis's family spoke openly of his work for the USSR but Pincher is now dead, and I don't really believe him at face value.

https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150417_Repo... This document lays out pretty much everything known about Hollis, along with some (IIRC) elsewhere uncommon information linking Hollis's movements with that of the spy SONIA.

The real story here isn't really whether Hollis was a spy or not (he was incompetent as far as I can see), but that the Russian's are unbelievably good at espionage (but not unbeatable - see Operation PIMLICO).

The fact that it was invented in Russia doesn't mean that this sample was Russian made. Every decent chemist can produce that stuff. We were also shown powerpoint slides of Saddams truck-mounted labs of WMD - they just didn't exist. The second mission was to "win hearts and minds". Result: 1,000,000 people dead. Women, old people, children and toddlers included. Just watch collateral damage again. Do it 100,000 times and you know what happened in Iraq. Plus a dash of abuse and torture of prisoners of war in the Abu Ghraib prison. There are plenty of things I doubt when I hear about them.

>Every decent chemist can produce that stuff.

After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.

Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039123/#R19

Iranians were the first to publish about the synthesis:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcm.7757

https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/do/10.1002/sepspec.1591c...

I am pretty sure that the Porton Down military research facility next to Salisbury is capable or producing it too - but that doesn't mean they produced the specific poison used to attack the Skipals.

The same for VX gas that was used to kill Kim Jong Un's brother in Malaysia. VX was indeed invented by the brits but I would seriously doubt that they killed Kim Jong-Nam.

Edit: this is just factual information. What kind of fscking loosers do downvote this? Go get a reality check.

You're right - any well-equipped state could have synthesized the nerve agent used on the Skripals. But that's not the only evidence: two suspects were identified, who traveled from Russia and stayed at a local hotel. The nerve agent was found in their hotel room.

Of course, you could argue that British intelligence framed those Russians during the investigation, and poisoned the Skripals themselves as some sort of ruse for expelling diplomats. But if you deny the evidence and proceed down that path, you've made the decision not to alter your beliefs and no discussion will change your mind.

seems to be a lot more downvoting recently. getting to where my eyes are drawn to those comments first, which is funny. blow a raspberry at them.

>Also why was never the full tracks of the two Russians the victims revealed?

They are revealed here pretty well: https://web.archive.org/web/20180927051828/http://news.met.p...

Can you give an example where Russia is portrayed unfairly?

I too am interested in examples. Typically, instead I see straw man “western governments do bad things too” to deflect.

You may start with this article https://medium.com/@dominicbasulto/russophobia-and-the-dark-...

It has some great images, especially in the final part.

That's negative portrayal of a violent corrupt dictatorship.

It started long before Putin and long before communists.

But things changed - Russia is much more known - while something remained the same - perception of the threat. Only now there are causes for that, so the article isn't accurate, portraying West as being "unnaturally" negative to Russia. West is negative for specific reasons, something which the article fails to address.

I think I read similar piece when they tried to shuffle their shooting of MH-17 and point the finger on Ukraine. Turns out to be propaganda as well.

How about this https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/30/20938550/call-of-duty-mod...

Tl;dr American army did carnage, the (one of most popular) game portraits that Russians did that

Or entire company of heroes 2 controversy

This is pure propaganda

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. That's an awful story.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Russians in 2017:

"...the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor..." [1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/james-clapper...

Says the habitual liar James Clapper who verifiably lied under oath several times.

Was he punished for it?

Of course not. None of these deep state fucks are ever punished for anything.

Any action movie where the bad guys are stereotypical Russians? The way Russians and their culture are disparaged in media? I remember reading a WaPo article where some old lady was telling political canvassers to fuck off, and the entire time the article was fixating on her "Russian accent" and saying things like "this isn't russia we have democracy here". Really despicable racism.

As someone who was born and grew up under Russian occupation I can assure you everyone on the inside of Iron Curtain was aware how bad it was even back then.

As someone speaking for everyone you sound stupid.

Why would they demonize a place that throws doctors out of windows, poisons political opponents, kills journalists, and has a horrible reputation for LGBT rights?

Weird, right? /s

Not to mention actively trying to meddle with US elections.

And Brexit, and French and German elections, and shoot down Dutch airlines, etc.

You see, when anything go wrong in the world it's Russia's fault:) Especially if someone loses some elections - blame Russia 100% of the time.

Except... those things explicitly are Russia's fault. You can keep pretending Russia is a benevolent member of the international community all you want, but that simply does not make it true.

I’ve previously heard that claim about Brexit, but not about the other three.

Even then, despite being so Remain-y I moved to Berlin, I don’t see how Russia made enough of a difference to count as successfully interfering compared to all the decisions taken by Cameron up to the day of the referendum itself.

Well, the US is since WWII meddling with elections in other countries. And not only that but actively toppling foreign governments. The few millions some Russians may have spent on ads are a drop in the sea compared to the billions and billions that PACs and SuperPACs have spent.

Well Saudi Arabia is hundred times worse than all we have in Russia on every point you mentioned. But guess who get all the sanctions?

Saudi Arabia exports oil but apart from that is generally just completely irrelevant. It is a terrible, despotic regressive craphole, but it doesn't have context enough in the world to come up a lot.

To the dead reply to me - lol. Saudi Arabia's geopolitical power is entirely predicated on the US acting in its interest, which was a premise that only held when the US was dependent on oil imports.

Saudi Arabia's economy is non-existent and hyper-unproductive, and its military is farcical. While it has some modern hardware, it has F-15s being staffed by profoundly incompetent princlings (just another example of the broken nature of the society, where it is the absolute inverse of a meritocracy. Incompetence and nepotism from top to bottom).

Saudi Arabia is irrelevant, unless maybe you're some Indian guy looking for a job where you live in servitude as a slave in some foreign nation. When they do deplorable things it just doesn't get a lot of notice because it's entirely expected. They got to prance around with an imagined importance when they could squeeze the oil spigot, but now...eh. Those days are long gone.

Back in 2004, I did some consulting work for a manufacturer of Identification Friend-Foe (IFF) equipment. One of my colleagues had to go in and replace an IFF transponder on a Saudi military boat after its commander (a minor member of the royal family) decided, during the First Gulf War, to take it out of port despite knowing the IFF transponder was not working. A British RAF Tornado mistook the boat for Iraqi after it failed to auto-respond the pilot's IFF interrogation message. One HARM anti-radiation missile later, and anything near or behind the boat's radar dish looked like Swiss chesese, including the IFF transponder and pretty much everything in the mess hall. My colleague said that the mess hall looked like someone walked in with a shotgun and a ton of shells and just started blasting in all directions.

That commander had no business being in charge of a lemonade stand, much less a military vessel, and I'm told such nepotism is rampant in the Saudi military. People who have been isolated from all consequences of their actions for their whole lives tend to make terrible leaders.

Most of the current sanctions against Russia were a direct response to Russia's paramilitary invasion of a peaceful neighbor and theft of a large portion of their country.

If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response, or worse (remember what happened to Saddam Hussein).

You don't consider the situation in Yemen comparable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...

What Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen is a war crime in my opinion. But it's also part of an ongoing proxy war against Iran, whose government has made it clear that the goal is to destabilize the Saudi regime. So no, not comparable to Russia's ongoing attempt to reassemble its lost Soviet empire by destabilizing and invading neighbors who pose no threat to it.

Go read that wikipedia article you posted. It links to a good explanation of the Iran-Arab proxy conflict.

Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter. The wars with Ukraine and Georgia were about maintaining buffer states (And to serve as a warning to the rest), rather than reassembling an empire.

Or at least, the facts can line up with this interpretation.

Maintaining a buffer is exactly why the Soviets annexed half of Europe after WWII, and spent the next half century brutally oppressing the populations therein. That's the whole point. But regardless, this is such a silly semantic quibble. Who cares why Russia wants to reassemble its empire? The international community is understandably alarmed by Russia's actions, and naturally care little about Putin's justifications.

> Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter.

Fuck, this again? Go ahead and connect the dots for me. Explain what specific actions on the part of NATO, or the countries that have requested membership in NATO, were responsible for Russia suddenly invading a neighbor country that posed no threat to it, forcibly annexing a large part of it, and maintaining a ruinous and deadly guerilla conflict in much of the rest.

Let me reverse that question.

What specific actions of NATO lead you to think that its ambitions for Russia in the 2010s differ from its ambitions for the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s?

What has changed since the Cold War, in those ambitions? What specific actions has NATO taken that make it clear that those ambitions have changed? What reassurance is Russia expected to see that encirclement, containment, and isolation is not the goal of the West? I can't see a single bloody one.

We're going down the exact same road again, the only difference is that the front line is now 300 miles further east. Which is very comforting for Czechs, and Hungarians but unfortunately, far less so for Ukranians.

(Oh, and to answer your question, I think 'US Army bases in Poland' is a pretty good, solid example of why Russia feels threatened. Had the War in Donbas not happened, as likely as not, we'd have been seeing US Army bases in Crimea today. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. I advise that the best way to win for the buffer states is to either adopt neutrality, or, barring that, to not antagonize the side that's being backed into a corner.)

You're asking for proof of a negative? Proof that NATO isn't nefariously plotting Russia's demise? And "encirclement"? Really? The borders with NATO countries comprise like five percent of Russia's total border length. If NATO is trying to encircle Russia, they're doing a really shitty job.

Honestly, I'm not interested in engaging with this prove-a-negative nonsense. In my humble opinion, invading a neighbor and annexing part of it can't be justified short of a clear, present, and profound security risk. NATO, a voluntary, chronically underfunded defensive organization almost completely subservient to the political gyrations of the US, the leader of which is now actively trying to destroy it, is not that risk, and I don't believe that anybody honestly thinks it is.

Putin will gladly use any action on the part of European countries to justify more invasions. Like the way Sergey Lavrov threatened "military technical measures" in the Baltic region if Sweden joined NATO. Remember that? The Baltic states are lined up like dominos, possibly Belarus as well, where I've heard rumors that Russia is already sending troops. As Trump says when he has no clue what he's talking about, "We'll see what happens".

Soviet Union and Russia have always been incredibly paranoid about the vulnerability of the populated interior.

I believe NATO has the capability to bomb Moscow from Latvia in minutes.

I don't think Russia rates its vulnerability by border ratio vs total NATO aligned country border ratio. They look at how fast NATO could wreck Moscow.

Nope.

Saudis chopped WSJ journalist Hashoggi into parts! literally!

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...

Yes, and I believe sanctions would be an appropriate response for that atrocity, as they should be for any state-sponsored murders of journalists or opposition politicians.

Good thing SA did not invade Yemen, had nothing to do with Khashoggi "suffering a paper cut" and absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 neither

You're missing the point.

Yes, thanks, we know. The Saudi Arabian regime is shamelessly and violently fascist, and corrupt at every level. What the fuck does that have to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and theft of the Crimean peninsula, and the commensurate response by the international community?

You stated:

> If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response

Offenses were cited to you. Where is the "commensurate response by the international community" to these offenses?

Read my comment again. I said that if SA were to do what Russia did -- invade a peaceful neighbor with no provocation and steal a portion of their country -- then I'm confident that sanctions would be levied against them. Pretty simple proposition, really.

So you don't think the Yemen situation is worse than Crimea (which is a complicated issue in itself?). Or even SA financing the expansion of Wahhabism?

I think SA gets too little sanctions for what they do. Too little.

And by the way, I'm totally in favour of Russia sanctions. I'm not questioning any of that.

I agree. SA is a hugely destructive influence across the Middle East in lot of ways. For whatever reason, the strategic interests of SA and the US align just enough to keep them out of trouble. But if SA were to emulate Putin's foreign policy and annex, say, Kuwait, I promise their luck would run out fast. Funny, I seems to remember something sort of similar happening not too long ago...

What's complicated about Crimea?

Crimea is historically(last 250 years) Russian territory with Russian population which always leaned towards Russia.

During reclaim there were not any resistance from the local population. It says a lot.

Crimea was Ukrainian for last 20 years and before that it was Soviet for 70 years.

And you're wrong about resistance as well.

Aren’t most of the sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea? Also, SA is an ally who allows a significant US military presence on its soil, in an area of strategic importance to global energy supply. Russia on the other hand still maintains an adversarial posture toward much of the Western world.

Yes, you can spawn freakazoo outfits who ram airplanes into skyscrapers, for as long as you have a US airbase.

I had a shock beyond believe seeing Bush pretty much saying "let Saudis go!," and jumping out of his skin trying to shield them, and then starting a war on Saddam — SA's biggest enemy at the time.

But lets keep the conversation on topic.

Really? From which point of view? Arguably true for the Yemenites, but the fact is, no one really care about the Yemenites (sorry if there are Yemenites reading that but it's a fact). Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

> Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

O_O you are so wrong, it is one the biggest foreign lobbying power in America, and Europe.

But this is not the point of this conversation.

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